This article was originally published on Common Edge.
About a decade ago, the term "resilience planning" became ubiquitous in climate circles. That shift, in the wake of increasingly unpredictable events, was shaped in part by the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities program, a six-year, $160 million effort to establish chief resilience officers in cities all over the world. Out of that program, which ended in 2019, emerged its successor, Resilient Cities Catalyst (RCC), a New York–based nonprofit engaged in what it calls "capacity building" projects. For Climate Week, I talked to Sam Carter, one of RCC's founding principals, about his definition of resilience, the organization's planning and philanthropic method, and the challenge of scaling up climate efforts.
MCP: Martin C. Pedersen
SC: Sam Carter
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What is Urban Resiliency?MCP: What's the origin story of Resilient Cities Catalyst?
SC: We launched it in 2020 as a direct continuation of the 100 Resilient Cities Program and the broader resilience work of the Rockefeller Foundation. I joined the foundation in 2013, when Judith Rodin was president. She's now our board chair at RCC. She had been thinking a lot about resilience. "Resilience" wasn't the coin of the realm, as it is now. Initially it was a deliberate and well-funded campaign that the Rockefeller Foundation ran.
MCP: Eleven years later, there are chief resilience officers all over the world. About 20 states have them. What does the word mean now?
SC: Resilience definitely means different things to different people. It's always been a slippery term. My hope is that it's better defined today than when we started. In 2013, we were almost using it as a metaphor—a catchall term to capture the messy space of adaptation and adaptive management. The reason why we thought it was such a powerful term was because the common challenge everyone was facing: managing uncertainty.
There are three forces that are driving and putting pressure on our social, cultural, and environmental systems right now: climate change, globalization, and the increase in population. Those forces are converging in ways that humans have never had to deal with before. We're operating at an unprecedented scale. On one hand it's terrifying, but on the other hand, we've also never known so much about the future, never been able to anticipate so much. For most of human history, we only knew what had happened in the past. We didn't have global scientific models to understand how climate will change. We now have this unique vantage point in human history where we can see forward, which is scary. Was the future of the world always scary and we just didn't know it before? Or are we in a uniquely precarious time right now? I don't know.
Part of the work we did at 100 Resilient Cities was creating a common language for people to apply resilience thinking into actual management. It involved creating a training manual for resilience officers: What's the job description? How do they function in a city government? What resources, authorities, and tools do they need? In addition to creating that program and creating this global network of chief resilience officers, and training them up and building cohorts, we were also funding the development of more rigorous methods to actually measure and evaluate whether a place was resilient or not.
MCP: What makes a place resilient?
SC: For me, it boils down to three core capacities. First, there's the ability to withstand shocks, what I call "absorptive capacity." So if you're thinking about a city like New York, its physical and social infrastructure needs to be able to absorb the impact of sudden events—a terrorist attack, a pandemic, a superstorm. This is how most people think of resilience. It's like a boxer receiving a blow—you gotta take the hit and still bounce back.
Second is adaptive capacity: how well a city can move resources and modify its systems to manage a big crisis. A good example of that is how we redeployed government and medical resources during the pandemic. And then the third capacity, the tough one, is transformative capacity. The ability for a community to say, "This isn't working anymore." That's what we're starting to see in South Florida, where some properties have been deemed uninsurable. Adaptive capacity is putting the house up on stilts. Transformative capacity says, "We're moving the city." All the different frameworks and different ways of thinking about resilience involve questions: Can you take a hit? Can you adapt and change your posture, so you don't get hit as hard the next time? Or do you need to leave the fight because it's the wrong fight for you now?
MCP: What are some of the current RCC initiatives?
SC: Our work is largely organized around three different areas: neighborhoods, projects, and regions. Our resilient neighborhoods program, led by Paul Nelson and Corrine LeTourneau, has been U.S.-based, but we're expanding internationally now. We've been working in cities like Tampa, Houston, and Phoenix and have started work with Toronto, Sydney, and Chennai. The core problem we're trying to tackle is the breakdown of trust between neighborhoods and city government. In most of the places we work, officials have a posture of managing community voices instead of partnering with them. At the community level, there's generational distrust. The government hasn't worked for them, especially in poor communities of color and other low-income communities. City government is perceived to be for someone else, rightly or wrongly. So we've been doing these tactical projects in those cities.
Then we have our project program, led by Andrew Salkin and Jeb Brugmann. They focus on projects that are crucial for communities but are stuck for some reason. For instance, we've been working for the past year in Yolo County, California. It's a largely agricultural region just north of Sacramento, where foods like almonds, tomatoes, and wine grapes are produced and exported. Despite this abundance, the local community faces a food crisis: many live in food deserts with limited access to fresh food, and jobs are hard to come by. Community groups and the county government decided they wanted to create a food hub, because they saw the need to rethink how local agriculture serves its own community. The goal was to build a single hub where food could be processed locally, helping smaller farmers get their goods to market, creating jobs to process the food, boosting the local economy, and giving the community better access to fresh food.
MCP: You do a lot of partnering. What do you look for in partners?
SC: Partnering is always hard. It takes time to build trust. What we bring to the table, a globally tested practice, is complemented by good partners. We know what works in different environments, and we're able to raise money from philanthropic sources that community partners might not be able to access. What we don't have is that deep local knowledge; that's where partners come in.
MCP: So is there one person that you try to make sure is your point person, responsible for executing on the ground?
SC: That's a good starting point. But for a partner to be effective, they need to have enough capacity to deliver. A partnership isn't just hopping on a call every other week—there needs to be the follow through and passion. Sometimes, to select projects, we run a competition. We issue a call, people propose ideas. We selected that Yolo food hub project from a competitive process. And the things that we're looking for are: Is there a network or one core partner that can be across the table from us and meet and deliver? Are they ready for it? We also test for their investment, their ownership, in a project. Especially if you're putting resources on the table, whether it's a grant or technical assistance, people's first inclination is, "Yeah, I want that!" We have to sift through and get a clear understanding of who's really committed to it and what's the most likely impact from doing this project. All of that is part of our evaluation process.
MCP: That brings me to a question about scale. We already have the knowhow to fix a lot of our big problems, but the obstacles are political. And that's an impediment to scale. What role does the RCC play in scaling up solutions?
SC: You sound like a board member! It's the right question. I'll give one answer, which is the organizational answer, but there's a philosophical aspect. The organizational answer is grounded in how we've built RCC. We had a moment in 2019 when we were planning this organization, where we easily could have turned this into a for-profit practice. People are willing to pay for the services we deliver. We win contracts that cities put out; that's part of our work. But we explicitly wanted to make it a nonprofit because we wanted to be a practice that, in every place we work, we're leaving behind more capacity than when we started.
We focus on two outcomes. One is achieving results, getting things built; real projects that are benefiting people and making places more resilient. The other is making sure that all our partners have more capacity when we exit. We know we can't be everywhere, forever. We're just one shop, and there needs to be hundreds of us, working collaboratively and sharing best practices. But consultants—not to pick on consultants, I work with a lot of them—have the easiest path to profitability. They figure something out and then replicate it. They don't want to train their clients how to do it, because then they don't need you.
There's something extractive about that. It allows governments to appear lean on paper with fewer staff, but they end up paying the same consultants to do the same study every year. Capacity building is different: we train our partners. We give them additional resources, sometimes in the form of grants and awards, so that they can hire new people, skill them up, and make them part of their team. That's the kind of thing we can do as a nonprofit that would be very hard to do as a for-profit consulting firm.
MCP: And the philosophical part of the question?
SC: We fundamentally need to change the way we organize our society. We have a kind of funny name: Resilient Cities Catalyst. What's a catalyst? But we exist, I hope, in a kind of transitional moment, where we're trying to shift practice from one way of thinking, which is very narrow: I do transportation, I do health, I do education. We've traditionally worked in silos, but now, with the pressures our systems are under, we can't think that way anymore. We have to think across sectors, because the interconnections between these things are so apparent, and they're never more apparent than in a disaster, when everything starts to fall apart. We have a pandemic, for example, and suddenly we also have a global supply chain crisis. On top of that, there's a spike in unemployment, and critical public health systems are overwhelmed. These cascading effects show how interconnected our systems are.
Our organization exists in response to an immediate need. We're also experiencing this transformation of consciousness as a species, where we're positioning ourselves more in relationship to nature. Because we're so confronted by it, with more extreme events. I hope that our organization eventually won't be as necessary in order to bridge this gap between how people are behaving and how they should behave, because there will be this bigger paradigm shift.
MCP: But how do you do that without the political end?
SC: I don't think you can. It's a political project.
MCP: There's implementation with political buy-in, then there's the attempt at implementation without political buy-in, which can often feel futile.
SC: As a nonprofit, we're limited in what type of political activities we can engage in. We can't lobby or influence specific legislation. But we try to create spaces where community voices are better heard and create processes where governments are held more accountable to the communities that they serve.
MCP: What's an example of that?
SC: We just wrapped up this competition in the city of Oceanside, California. It's called Re Beach. For 40 years, they've had a problem that just keeps getting worse every year. It started with the construction of a hard structure at a harbor mouth that stopped sediment flow from its natural source. Then, as the city hardened the coastline further, sea level rise began impacting southern California. The storms became more violent. Like most small cities in the area, Oceanside always managed its beaches by bringing in sand. In the past, sand placement would last three to five years. Now it lasts three months. The cost of getting sand has skyrocketed because everything's gotten more expensive, and there are fewer sources of sediment. One of the natural sources of sediment were the bluffs, but guess what? They've built on the bluffs.
For decades, the city had been trying to figure out how to solve this problem. There was a lot of finger pointing, especially toward the Army Corps of Engineers. Finally the city said, "We can't just keep buying sand. We have to take action. This is our problem." And they did a couple cool things! They hired a coastal zone administrator as a key staff position. And in partnership with her, we designed an international design competition, which the city funded. We ran a public process where the design teams came in, shared ideas, and conducted charrettes. We went from a skeptical and divided city council to unanimous approval of the final design, which no one thought would be possible. And, by the way, the winning design is really cool. It's an artificial headland, with an artificial reef that will adapt to sea level rise, manage the shoreline, and create new wave breaks.
MCP: That's a lot of hands-on engagement. You can't say yes to everything, and the problems are huge, so how do you choose?
SC: I was really interested in Southern California as a specific place to bring my experience, because most of the work that I've done has been in the post-disaster context. Something bad happens, money starts to flow, and then there's an opportunity to reimagine what was there. And it's tough, because people want things to go back to the way that they were. This gets to this philosophical thing I was talking about before. We need to go to a place where we're not just sitting around waiting for disasters to happen, to change how we behave and how we live and how we build.
In the U.S. context, Southern California offered an opportunity to do that. We want to create a planning model in Oceanside that any city could implement. This is a pilot project that's going to teach us something. I'm in no way suggesting that every city needs an artificial reef and headland. That's what's right for Oceanside. But the process they went through is something any city could do. This wasn't something that a philanthropy paid for. They paid for it. We're now working with the city to identify what policy mechanisms would allow them to keep doing this type of work. And this November they have a ballot measure, called Measure X, that, if it's adopted, would allocate funding for coastal resilience going forward.
MCP: That would almost be a perfect outcome for you.
SC: It would be incredible. And again, we don't lobby. We didn't tell them to do this, per se, but we've been encouraging them and showing them how they can do this and, as a partner, trying to help them move into this place, where they have enhanced capacity. If we can demonstrate how one moderately sized city in California can get ahead of a problem and take thoughtful, future-focused action on it, that will inspire other cities.
Implementing a resilience project is different from a traditional infrastructure project, because you have to think about these different systems. It's not just, "Oh, we're building a bridge." We're trying to solve for climate, for mitigation and adaptation goals, and we're trying to solve for social and community goals. One of the analogies I use is, you have to think about not just the resilience of the bridge that you're building, but also what that bridge is going to do to the resilience of the communities that it's connecting.
